Ken Dixon: Next step on gun control fast approaching

Published 5:35 pm, Friday, January 11, 2013

Hey "gun enthusiasts" of Connecticut. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that state officials and the General Assembly aren't looking to take away your advanced weaponry.

Remember back in 1993? Of course you recall the year the state banned assault-style weapons.

The Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen failed to overturn the law in a knock-down, drag-out showdown in Litchfield Superior Court. It seems like only yesterday, when then-Attorney General Dick Blumenthal successfully defended the law, which banned particular makes and models.

But the gun-manufacturing industry played cat and mouse, tweaking the various rifles, changing brand names and specifications, then bragging about it in their advertising.

The removal of a bayonet holder here, a flash suppressor there, the installation of a pistol grip instead of a standard rifle triggers and voila, you have a street-legal Bushmaster AR-15 just like the one that Adam Lanza took from the family manse on Yogananda Street in Newtown.

Monday will be the first-month anniversary of the morning he murdered his gun enthusiast mother, Nancy, 52, in her bed. He then tried to destroy his computer hard drive, grabbed the Bushmaster, two handguns and a shotgun, walked into the garage and drove toward downtown Sandy Hook.

Who knows what was going through his head, but most likely it was going to end with him dying, even with the ear protection he brought, just as if he was going to a range to squeeze off some rounds.

At some point, as Lanza approached the Interstate 84 overpass, he must have made a calculus of death. Newtown High School was right there. All he had to do was turn left into the school parking lot and revisit what was such as awkward, flailing period of his life a few years earlier that his mother withdrew her psychologically fragile boy from the school.

Of course, he would never have been able to fire off as many rounds in the high school. He would have been jumped by boys after the first 30 rounds were fired off, maybe even confronted at the door by a cop, and he knew it.

So he kept driving a little farther, took a right on quiet Dickenson Drive and embarked on his murder spree in a roomful of first graders in a school where he might once have been happy, years before his demons accumulated along with his psychoses, overloading his brain with bloody fantasies.

Guys like Lanza always get the order wrong in those murder/suicides, failing to first shoot themselves.

But guns don't kill people, goes the tired-out Emperor New Clothes quote from the gun lobby. A gun certainly killed a lot of people on December 14 and now, even law-abiding gun owners are going to be paying some of the wages of death. So get used to it.

Current law would have allowed Lanza to purchase his own Bushmaster without even a cursory check of his background. He could have driven to Monroe Town Hall, given them $19, collected his firearms hunting license, then drive to the nearest gun dealer to score his very own Bushmaster. Presenting a hunting license, under current law, precludes even a cursory background check.

Of course, he had his mother's weapon, instead, that morning of murder.

Let's go back to 1993. Connecticut's gun owners had tens of thousands of assault-style weapons. Part of the legislation allowed owners to keep them if they first registered them with authorities. There are still about 8,000 out there that were never registered. How law-abiding is that?

The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution talks about a "well-regulated militia," but the Connecticut Constitution says "Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state."

In 1994, as part of another round of gun control legislation, lawmakers agreed to protect the list of pistol permit holders from public scrutiny. Up until then, years before the expansion of the Internet, they were open for public scrutiny. They were essentially hidden in public view. Who was going to drive to State Police headquarters and copy down tens of thousands of names and addresses?

There is now a movement to reopen the lists. It just takes a bill in the General Assembly that would be approved by Gov. Dannel Malloy.

The logic involved in trying to defeat this bill should put gun owners in the position of saying the weapons they have for the defense of their homes are essentially useless, because their names and addresses would be public.

Then they might as well return their weapons, possibly to a buy-back program like Bridgeport's, which has taken more than 400 off the streets.

So where do those surrendered guns go? State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance said last week that purchased weapons get turned over to their experts, who test them to see if they have been involved in crimes.

"If not we melt them down," he said. Also in the load for destruction are guns turned over by the court.

A private, in-state company melts them down into a pile of smoldering metal. "In the old days, they were used to make manhole covers," Vance said, recalling the days when something positive could result from firearms.